Into the COLAverse – Episode 17: Scott Graham

[00:00:00] Frederick: Welcome to Into the Culver, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Salma, as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. It’s my great honor to be here with Scott Graham, associate.

[00:00:26] Frederick: Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing and faculty affiliate with the Center for Health Communication. Welcome Scott.

[00:00:35] Scott: Thanks, Frederick. It’s great to be here to talk with you.

[00:00:39] Frederick: My gosh, Scott, I have like gazillions of questions about you, your work, but um, gosh, I know you’re deep into the AI.

[00:00:49] Frederick: You are like people, you know, your phone must be ringing off the hook right now. Um, machine learning, communication, uh, rhetoric, all of the, all of those things, bioethics. Your work. Um, so, so important. But before we get into the kind of details on this, tell us a little bit about, my goodness, you, you got your ba Eckerd College back in oh three philosophy.

[00:01:19] Frederick: Um, you make your way to rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University, both MA and then a PhD in 2010. Um, Took a position at University of British Columbia, then University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and then in 2018 you joined us at UT Austin. But what so philosophy, but you know, where, where did you like.

[00:01:46] Frederick: How did that become a thing for you? Was it, were you reading Plato as like a five-year-old? Um, but then how did this lead you to sort of rhetoric and writing and Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your journey.

[00:02:01] Scott: Yeah. Mm-hmm. , it’s a great question. It’s, uh, you know, a, a lot of twists and turns, a lot of happy accidents along the way.

[00:02:09] Scott: Um, so I was certainly not reading Plato as a five year old. I like to think I was a smart kid, but I wasn’t that smart of a kid. Um, but, uh, I was really interested in. You know, just thinking about deeper questions. In, in high school I was a member of the debate team, so I, you know, I like to argue about moral questions and, uh, so that, that really led me to philosophy early on.

[00:02:37] Scott: Like that’s the major I declared as a first year student at, and, um, it’s. It’s what I thought I would do, right? I had this sort of vision of becoming a philosophy professor when I started down that path. And, um, uh, you know, I went a different path for a number of reasons. Um, so I really enjoyed my philosophy training.

[00:02:57] Scott: I got a lot out of it. Um, it was, you know, as some folks know, Even though the distinction is eroding, there’s kind of a historic distinction between continental and analytic philosophy, uh, and continental, the continent in question being. Europe tends a focus on, um, um, mainland European, French and German thinkers and analytic philosophy is the Anglo-American tradition, more or less.

[00:03:25] Scott: And I, it’s very rare for. Program and philosophy in the US to be focused exclusively on continental philosophy. But mine was, and so it, when I got towards the end of my graduate or my undergraduate studies, I realized that if I wanted to keep studying what I was studying, there were very few places in the US in philosophy, uh, at that time.

[00:03:49] Scott: They would really. The, the thinkers that I wanted to work with, the things that I want to do. Um, I also was really interested in coming up with ways to apply the philosophical questions that I was working with. And even though since then I’ve learned that there’s a lot of great applied areas in philosophy like bioethics and empirical bioethics, um, I didn’t know about those in under.

[00:04:14] Scott: Right. I didn’t know there were options. They weren’t things that my faculty members had a lot of expertise in. And so, um, I, I took a gap here and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do that would, um, leverage those things that I liked, reading those things that I liked thinking about, but in a kind of more applied way than I thought at the time philosophy could do.

[00:04:37] Scott: And so, uh, here’s the first happy accident. Um, I was kind of thinking rhetoric might be interesting cuz it, I. Engages with the philosophical tradition a lot that has very applied dimension. I was kind of thinking psychology could be interesting for the same reasons, has a clear of wide dimension. Um, and so I decided to open and enroll in a rhetoric class in a psych class at Iowa State to see which one’s gonna fit me.

[00:05:00] Scott: Anyway, the psych class was full, so here I am. Um, That’s, that’s the kind of first happy accident. Mm mm-hmm. . Um, and the, the rhetoric clash just spoke to me and I just doubled down on it, you know, within, within a few weeks. Mm-hmm.

[00:05:16] Frederick: Scott, what, let me, let me just ask you for some of our listeners that might not be in the know on this, just in a.

[00:05:24] Frederick: Just kind of off the cuff, what’s your, how do we distinguish, first of all, continental from analytic and, and then second, um, and maybe related Lee, what is this field of

[00:05:38] Scott: rhetoric? Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And so, I’m nervous to give you a good answer on continental versus analytic, not being a card carrying philosopher.

[00:05:49] Scott: But, um, some of the, the, the through lines are, um, in the history of Western philosophy, um, there tends to be several major sub areas of inquiry. So metaphysics is about the true nature of reality. Epistemology is about how we know what we know. Um, aesthetics is about questions of beauty ethics, about questions of morality, and one distinguishing feature of the analytic tradition was it really narrowed in very specifically on logic and epistemology.

[00:06:23] Scott: Um, and, and treat some of those ways of thinking as the primary modes of philosophy. And at least according to my undergraduate training, the continental tradition was more likely to engage in the whole broader swath of historic philosophical traditions. So, um, You know, aesthetics, um, still being part of it.

[00:06:45] Scott: Um, for example, in a way that it, it does crop up an analytic, right? These, these is not a hard dividing line at all, right? So these are broad tendencies that kind of distinguish the areas and so rhetoric. Um, so way back in ancient Greece, rhetoric and philosophy were coex extensive, the same people were doing both.

[00:07:04] Scott: Plato has works on philosophy and works on rhetoric. Aristotle has works on. Um, but essentially the rhetorical tradition in the west focuses on practical communication, uh, argumentation in, um, political spheres. So how do members of a democratic elite elected assembly debate and discuss what society’s going to do?

[00:07:28] Scott: Uh, legal spheres, right? So how do lawyers advocate for their clients or for a conviction? Um, and in the sort of in the public sphere, how do we as a society negotiate matters of ethics? Matters of put praise and blame, right? So these are our stumps speeches or media and, uh, there’s certainly a rich tradition of.

[00:07:51] Scott: Argument and discourse in philosophy, but historically it is focused a lot more on that type of argument that is meant specifically to get to the truth, like deep philosophical truths. And so rhetoric is the, all the argument in everyday life, if you will. Wow. Um,

[00:08:10] Frederick: Scott, for off the cuff responses, that was pretty extraordinary.

[00:08:15] Frederick: Um, let me ask you then, with your first book, the Politics of Pain Medicine and then the subtitle, A Rhetorical Ontological Inquiry, uh, rhetorical, ontological. , um, it seems like you are bringing this, this impulse and need for an, an applied ethics together with your, um, yeah. Your. Your work, your passion, your deep scholarly inquiry into the, the field of, uh, rhetorical studies, especially in and around this new field or this field of pain medicine.

[00:08:54] Frederick: Can you tell us, talk, talk us through this? Yeah.

[00:08:58] Scott: Uh, so. In some ways, um, what I really love about rhetoric is it provides us with a rich lexicon and set of approaches for thinking about practical argumentation. And so this is really interesting to me. In a space like interdisciplinary pain medicine pain’s complicated, the best pain scientists have.

[00:09:20] Scott: Fraught and competing definitions of what pain is. You can think in your own life, like we call pain when you accidentally touch a hot burner on a stove or when someone dumps you. That’s both pain. But those are two very different experiences and so, uh, pain is both fraught because it’s physiologically complicated because it has.

[00:09:42] Scott: Powerful psychological dimensions. And then of course it’s also politically fraught when you think about things like the opioid epidemic over prescription. Um, there’s a lot of issues, um, philosophically, scientifically, and um, politically. That circulate around pain. And so when pain is being approached in a rigorous and robust way, you get experts from everywhere.

[00:10:06] Scott: So you get your MDs, your neurologists, your um, interventional anesthesiologists. You get chiropractors, you get nurses, you get psychologists, you get politicians. All these people coming from radically different perspectives, radically different areas of disciplinary or practical training, and they have to talk it out and they have to make sense of this thing that is pain and what we should do about it in the world.

[00:10:31] Scott: And to me that’s a fascinating rhetorical problem because they’re all being driven by these different. Different foundational perspectives on what paint is and what we should do about paint. Uh, and so that’s the rhetorical part of the inquiry. But historically, rhetoric, as I mentioned before, has really been focused on language and argument.

[00:10:53] Scott: And so it, it, it has a lot of robust tools for how we talk about language and argument. How do we describe different tactics of debate? Uh, but there’s a real physical dimension to. Right. It is, it’s one of the most physical and embodied things that there is. Um, and when you’re talking about the science of pain, you’re talking about working on real human bodies with real scientific experimental methods and.

[00:11:19] Scott: I don’t think you can fully capture what it means to think about pain if you only talk about the language of pain. And so where I bring some of my philosophical training and rhetorical training together there is to try to talk about the underlying reality of pain, the many different types of pain and the ways that we argue about pain at the same time.

[00:11:41] Scott: Right.

[00:11:42] Frederick: Yeah. Uh, so, and I know you’ve written also on the opioid crisis, um, and later in a minute we’ll be talking about kind of the way AI has been. Uh, rhetorically manipulated, if you will, to incentivize. And of course, pain is one of those as well, right? So, you know, what better way for a politician to kind of galvanize and incentivize than in and around.

[00:12:13] Frederick: Something like pain. Right. Common experience of pain. I was thinking about the, the train, uh, wreck that just happened in Ohio and how we’re seeing, um, I’m sure you’ve been very, you know, interested in this, coming from your perspective on, uh, re rhetoric and philosophy, but Yeah, how it’s been incentivized, right.

[00:12:37] Frederick: Um, let me ask you while we’re on the subject of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine one, what is that exactly? And two, I know that you co-edited Rhetoric of Health and Medicine as is. Um, yeah. Can you tell us, uh, me and the listeners what this is? Rhetoric of health and medicine? Yeah,

[00:13:01] Scott: so it is, it’s. Very broad, very flexible subdisciplinary area.

[00:13:09] Scott: Um, mainly folks who are trained in rhetorical studies, but also folks from communication. Um, occasionally philosophy or bioethics participate in this area. And essentially it is a question of. So much about health and care and medicine is determined by how we argue about these things and how we talk about these things.

[00:13:32] Scott: So if you think about something like the moment you see a doctor, you and the doctor are having a linguistic exchange, a discursive exchange about what’s going on in your body, um, about what might help, if there’s an issue that needs to be addressed and, and. Although it all has real bodily and physical consequences, most of what mediates that interaction is language.

[00:13:55] Scott: Um, you might add some lab tests in there, but the, the fundamental unit of the clinical encounter is talking. And so that’s where a lot of this work started is like, okay, how do PA patients, uh, express their needs to physicians? How do physicians, um, onboard patient needs and values? Try to suggest the best course of action, but without being manipulative about what patients should do.

[00:14:23] Scott: Right. So there’s, there’s complex language and argumentative dynamics there. And then since then, rhetoric of health and medicine has also expanded to talk about health policy. So when the FDA is debating whether or not a new drug should be approved, there’s a very language. At the center of that, um, the F d A has this advisory committee program that are literally, um, like court trials.

[00:14:45] Scott: Like if you think about lawyers arguing about whether or not a drug should get an approval, there’s a pro team, there’s a con team, there’s cross-examination, and this is a huge part of whether or not a drug gets approved. It happens in these argumentative tactics. And so this is basically, these are all these places where language is super prominent in health.

[00:15:07] Scott: Health policy, in the culture of health and health policy is where Rhetoricians of health and medicine do their work. And so we try to understand how the arguments are unfolding and how they’re changing the practice of medicine or particular health policies or the culture of care. Yeah.

[00:15:31] Frederick: Really fascinating.

[00:15:32] Frederick: Yeah, I was, uh, just in the doctor’s office yesterday and the delivery, the doctor’s delivery or say story of what they found, um, and the DIA diagnostic, um, Generated fear in me, right? And kind of almost a shutting, an initial shutting down. Um, and an inability to articulate or to engage with that story, um, to kind of figure out how I could solve or part be a part of, you know, bringing the story to

[00:16:12] Scott: a re.

[00:16:14] Scott: Yeah. And this is a, a critical question that’s an ongoing question because obviously, um, there are some very unfortunate histories in medical practice of physicians not treating patients, especially minoritized patients, um, female patients, uh, you know, in the best ways and in fact often in actively harmful ways.

[00:16:38] Scott: And at the same time, um, a lot of folks, You know, you go to a doctor to get the expert information, to get guidance on what you should do to be as healthy as possible. And so it creates these sort of challenges about how to communicate in that concept cuz it’s, it’s scary information, which can and sometimes inhibit your ability to make good choices.

[00:17:01] Scott: But we also have seen the dangers of creating an environment where the doctor just makes choices for you. And so again, this, this very complex intersection. Philosophical moral issues and tactics of persuasion. It. There’s no easy resolution here, right? There are, there are guiderails that we can put on that encounter.

[00:17:21] Scott: There are active conversations that academics and clinicians need to have to figure out how to handle all those complexities in a moral way, but also in a way that leads to the best patient outcomes. Yeah.

[00:17:36] Frederick: You know, the initiatives and centers programs, I’m thinking about medical humanities, uh, reader, Sharon’s work and, and many others.

[00:17:47] Frederick: Really trying to clear, create spaces for medical providers to be in the same room with, uh, humanists, right? Mm-hmm. , um, hoping that. You know, somehow we can shift that, that delivery shift the way we hear and listen. Um, you know, because we need to, we need to, um, as you mentioned, um, I know for instance, culturally speaking, you know, with my, my Latino, Mexican kind dad, any, any information, no matter how beautifully delivered, say the, the story of his body and his health.

[00:18:30] Frederick: His automatic response. Skepticism. Mm-hmm. , um, you know, you’re just trying to get me to spend more money on medicine, , um, more tests, more, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s the cultural element

[00:18:43] Scott: too, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are communities that have a long and adversarial, uh, history with American medicine, with Western medicine, and.

[00:18:55] Scott: That’s certainly not gonna go o away overnight. Right. And while I think there are some areas of improvement, um, you know, we’re seeing, uh, some of the concerning dimensions of healthcare, uh, and its relationship with minoritized communities. Um, rear its ugly head again in as AI is coming on the scene. And so, uh, it’s.

[00:19:19] Scott: This is something like, like any issue that’s fraught like this that we’re gonna have to reckon with and rere with over and over again as a society, and hope that we do so in ways that lead us to a more just and equitable world.

[00:19:34] Frederick: Well, this is a beautiful way to, to move us into your most recent book. I know we’ve leapfrogged, uh, one of them, but I think this is important.

[00:19:43] Frederick: The. Bioethics bioscience health policy that you are committed to in your work. Um, and the book in 2022, the doctor and the algorithm promised peril in the future of health ai. So this is, like you were saying, you know, ai, it’s here. Um, and I know that you’ve been. You know, your phone’s been ringing off the hook, um, because of your, your particular, um, expertise in this intersection of, say, ethics or applied ethics and machine learning machine, um, making, so this particular work exactly goes into the areas of medical futurism and inequitable outcomes.

[00:20:36] Frederick: So let’s, yeah. Let me hear

[00:20:38] Scott: about all that. Yeah, so, uh, obviously ai, there’s so much excitement around it in every sector, and health and medicine is no exception. Um, for the last several years, health and medic medical AI has been either the single largest or basically in the top two for venture capital investments in the us right?

[00:20:58] Scott: Billions and billions of dollars at stake and. One of the biggest tensions that we have out of it. That’s, that’s one of the causes for real danger here is the, you know, the culture of Silicon Valley has often been the old retired Facebook motto, move fast and break things. Uh, and that’s proven dangerous enough with social media, with misinformation, disinformation, um, body image concerns that all arise from these algorithms.

[00:21:27] Scott: Um, But it’s even to being more terrifying when you apply it to a health and medical space. Cuz moving fast and breaking things is moving fast and breaking people. Uh, and that’s something we have to avoid at all costs Now. Uh, I describe myself as ai, cautiously optimistic. As you mentioned, I use some machine learning in my own work, and I can absolutely see ways in which that can improve healthcare.

[00:21:53] Scott: But my real concern in the book and my real concern broadly is that it has to be done closer to the timelines of medicine, right? So rigorous clinical trials are how we evaluate whether or not healthcare interventions are safe and effecti. and you can’t just roll out a new technology when lives are at stake and say, hope this works.

[00:22:16] Scott: Right? Just, just far too dangerous. And it’s is also what leads to a lot of the inequitable outcomes because most of this technology gets developed at, um, leading academic or medical centers. Um, so you think of things like the, the med schools that support, uh, or the, the hospitals that support, uh, the Harvard Med School or Dell Med School, um, right.

[00:22:39] Scott: That they often serve a wealthy clientele. Um, they often aren’t always, um, located in, um, very diverse areas. So one of the most popular small data sets for. Initially learning about health AI is the, um, Wisconsin breast cancer data set, and it was curated at the academic medical center in Madison and. I love Wisconsin.

[00:23:08] Scott: I used to live in Wisconsin, but if you go to Madison, you’ll note that it’s not necessarily the most diverse town in America. And so that dataset is a slice of the people that you expect to live in Wisconsin primarily. And if we’re using data sets like that to train AI systems, then deploy all over the country, it shouldn’t surprise us that they don’t work when we move them to more diverse hospitals, to low income hospitals.

[00:23:36] Frederick: Absolutely. You mentioned something along the way here. Silicon Valley’s moving fast and breaking things. Um, and, you know, social media as well as something very deeply, um, a part of our lives. I have a teenage daughter. I know that, you know, It’s, it’s, it’s one of those difficult things as a parent, you know, do you, for the longest time I was like, no, no, no.

[00:24:04] Frederick: But then everybody’s got it and, but then once you are on it, you know, there are these kind of body, social kind of images and so on. My, I guess this is kind of getting me to some of the things that you teach Scott.

[00:24:18] Scott: Um, you.

[00:24:21] Frederick: Um, and, and work on, I mean, you work on tutorials. You’ve written on this misinformation inoculation, literary support tutorials on Covid 19.

[00:24:32] Frederick: Uh, you talk about an in another piece of yours, opioid use and stigmatization destigmatization in social media. Um, AI for social justice. Um, what, and you also teach, you know, classes, you know, some of your courses on, you know, um, digital humanities, tech, writing and so on. Let’s let, let, can you explore with me then, tutorial social media, um, your work coming out of rhetoric?

[00:25:08] Scott: Yeah, absolutely. Um, um, so again, you know, with my, um, interest in health and medical rhetoric, um, what I tend to do when I study social media is study how healthcare providers or health policy experts or epidemiologists, how they use social media, what they say online. And I’ve done this in a number of different contexts.

[00:25:30] Scott: One context is looking at the early days of covid. Everyone was desperate for information. Nobody knew what was happening. Uh, we were scared if we were paying attention, and so Twitter became a fascinating resource for. Both good and bad information about covid and about what was happening. Uh, and the tutorial, especially the literacy support tutorial, um, is I think really fascinating.

[00:25:57] Scott: So what tutorials are basically just a thread of tweets. So rather than 1 280 character tweet, five to 10 of ’em stapled together, um, with an educational message. So it comes from, you know, uh, tweet plus tutorial. Smashed together into one word. Um, and they’ve been around since before Covid. Um, there’s a fam semi, a Twitter famous, I guess I would call it, uh, epidemiologist, uh, Ellie Murray, um, who’s been doing these a lot and teaching about the basics of epidemiology, the basics of causal inference, instance statistics, um, uh, before covid and so.

[00:26:36] Scott: Way of communicating on social media was ready to go when Covid hit. And it provided a great way to explain to people what was happening, what we know, what we don’t know. And then the literacy support variant is, um, Basically, nobody likes to be told they’re wrong . And we tend to throw up, um, psychological defense mechanisms when we, when we’re told that we’re wrong.

[00:27:00] Scott: And so one of the biggest problems with misinformation and disinformation is if you learn an incorrect fact and then someone comes along and tries to correct it, those defense mechanisms kick in and you’re like, no, I know what. Like, I, I wouldn’t be fooled, right? Nobody likes to think of themselves as the kind of person that could be taken in.

[00:27:19] Scott: Uh, and so the inoculation theory of misinformation is basically about trying to, as soon as possible, get out foundational information, basic literacy information so that. When you encounter misinformation, you’ve had a little bit of background already and you can better, um, say, nah, that doesn’t seem right to me.

[00:27:43] Scott: And so it’s been really exciting to see epidemiologists, physicians putting out these sort of literacy support tutorials that are like in the early days of covid. You know, let me tell you what an RNA is. You’re gonna see this number and somebody’s gonna say, are not of 13, and should you be scared or not?

[00:27:59] Scott: Right? And so providing that foundational information, um, goes a long way to blunt misinformation and disinformation. Uh, but. And I’ll transition a little bit into that other article you mentioned. It’s a double-edged sword. So, um, in our study of stigmatizing and de-stigmatizing language on social media, we, we looked at a bunch of physicians and healthcare providers and health policy experts to see if they were t talking in stigmatizing or destigmatizing ways about people who use drugs.

[00:28:32] Scott: And this is really important because there’s a lot of research that shows. Physicians stigmatize people who use drugs, then they’re less likely to get care, not only for like, uh, a opioid use disorder, for example, but for anything, right? They, they just think doctors are gonna judge me all the time. They don’t go see doctors, and that’s dangerous.

[00:28:54] Scott: And so it’s really important that, uh, healthcare providers use destigmatizing language so that people who use drugs feel comfortable getting healthcare and. So we wanted to map this on Twitter and see where people were, physicians and healthcare experts really using this language that they were supposed to be using.

[00:29:15] Scott: Um, and what we found, uh, o is over time it was getting better and better and better. And then covid burnout reversed the trend. Or we’re we’re guessing that it’s covid burnout, but when Covid hit, people started to be a lot more stigmatizing about people who use drugs, and we think that’s because of all the demands that Covid put on the healthcare system.

[00:29:37] Scott: To be intentional about your language, to be careful about your language and making sure that you’re not inadvertently offending someone that takes, you gotta think about what you’re saying, uh, especially if you, you know, we have a, a culture that’s historically stigmatized, people who use drugs. So we work taught at young ages as part of our DARE programs to, to be sort of dismissive of people who use drugs.

[00:30:00] Scott: And so, Uh, it, it requires a lot of cognitive availability to make those good linguistic choices. And if you burn out, you don’t have it. And it slips. Yeah. Being

[00:30:11] Frederick: intentional about our language takes work, . Yes. Um, and also being intentional about our learning environments. Our classrooms are teaching. Right.

[00:30:26] Frederick: So tell us a little bit about your intro. I don’t know, digital humanities, um, TechCom and wicked problems. Uh, apocalyptic tech writing. I want to take these classes. .

[00:30:42] Scott: Um, yeah, so, uh, basically, uh, what I teach, and it’s across any of these classes, is an extension of what I researched. So I’m really interested in, um, the way technology figures in.

[00:30:57] Scott: And so oftentimes, uh, in, maybe in some other disciplines, when you’re learning about technology, you learn about the nuts and bolts of it. You learn about how it works, what’s under the hood, how it was put together. And I think that’s all fascinating information and I teach some of that information in my courses.

[00:31:14] Scott: But I’m interested in, uh, what I’d probably like to teach about the most is the social dynamics of change. So when a new technology gets dropped in the world, Where do the ripples go? Right. Um, who benefits, who doesn’t benefit? What regulations need to be enacted as a result of that new technology? Um, technology is fundamentally connect, connected with society, with culture, with our daily lives.

[00:31:44] Scott: Um, and, and if we just think about the. We miss those connections. And so, uh, uh, another way of thinking about the broad umbrella of what I like to teach is the sort of critical technology appraisal, right? So we’re clearly living in a world where we’re gonna get new technology dropped on us all the time.

[00:32:04] Scott: You know, chat, G p t just hit the world by storm. And I think it’s really important to, uh, give students the tools to know, okay, here’s this new. How is it gonna affect the broader world, not just me? Where can it be beneficial? Where can it be harmful? Right? Because if all we do is teach about the tech that exists right now, we’re not equipping students for the tech that, that we haven’t even considered its existence yet.

[00:32:31] Scott: So that’s, that’s kind of the, the, the big umbrella of my teaching approach. So in any of these classes, we look at things like, um, new technologies or new infrastructures. So in the Wicked Problems class, we actually focus on the, the wicked problem of Austin traffic. Right? So you’ve driven around this town, you know, it’s a.

[00:32:52] Scott: Um, and there are a whole lot of technological solutions being offered to make it better. So if you’ve seen the new, um, uh, the new interchanges they’re putting on I 35 where you drive on the wrong side of the road for a little bit because that speech traffic, like, it’s very uncomfortable. But it turns out if you reduce the number of left turns, people make the traffic flows better.

[00:33:14] Scott: So we look at these things and look at the systemic effects of traffic. We talk about proposals for new I 35, running through neighborhoods, taking out businesses. Um, so that’s just one example really. Yes,

[00:33:27] Frederick: we, we, we need help in Austin, that’s for sure. We need help in, in urban cores, in urbans spaces. Um, generally, Scott, when you’re.

[00:33:38] Frederick: Bringing a balanced, more deeper understanding to new technologies dropped in our lives in the world, such as ai. What, what are you, what are you doing? Um, what are you reading? What are you watching? What’s grabbing you right now? Um, and where are you thinking you might be going with your work, um, in the

[00:34:01] Scott: future?

[00:34:02] Scott: Great questions. Um, yeah, so, uh, I should probably, um, cultivate a little bit better work life balance is why I’m honest . Um, but, uh, uh, when I do, um, what I read and what I watch is maybe a little too close to my work. So I’m interested in a lot of science fiction because it reflects on the same issues of dropping technology into spaces.

[00:34:27] Scott: And so, um, uh, what have I. You know, recently I’ve been rereading some things, so I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the, um, uh, the atrocity archive. Does that ring a bell to you? No. So, uh, no. Yeah. Uh, author Charlie STRs, um, and it’s this very strange series of books where it turns he, he’s, he’s diving into some fundamentals of some of touring’s discoveries and computer science.

[00:34:57] Scott: Um, and then, The fictional element, he takes this huge, weird left turn where he says that at a certain level of computer programming, it’s basically magic. And you can do magical things in the world. And that’s the, that’s the fictional can see of the book. But I think it’s an interesting way to think about how technology permeates our lives and how we talk about the magic of technology.

[00:35:18] Scott: But I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not a serious book. It’s a fun book to read, but there, there’s some depth in the, in the, some of the, the sophistication about the history of computer science that gets brought into, into the book. So that, that’s one thing that jumps to mind. Um, Uh, in terms of the future of my work, so I’m, I’m certainly gonna do some more with, uh, AI and, uh, the language of ai.

[00:35:43] Scott: So, one thing I’ve been working on a lot lately is, um, all the hype, cuz I think AI really can help health and medicine, but I think that it’s being oversold right now. There’s so much enthusiasm for it that we’re adopting technologies that are dangerous or that don’t. That don’t work as advertised. And usually the recommended solution to that is that we need to keep close to the science, right?

[00:36:09] Scott: That if we look at the pr, we look at the marketing, we look at the venture capital, it’s, it’s overly promissory. And if we keep close to the science, then, then we should be okay. But some of my research is showing how the science itself is often. Right, that there’s extravagant language in some of the foundational journal articles on these new health AI technologies.

[00:36:32] Scott: And, um, I’m exploring the ways that in, in some ways it looks like some of the underlying research designs that are used to evaluate if a new health AI technology is a good product, that if you measure how good it is, one way you find more hype in the articles than if you measure it a different way. And so I think that yes, we do need to keep close to the science.

[00:36:55] Scott: We do need high quality, rigorous, um, approaches to assessing if this technology works. But if you can measure it in two different ways, both, which are equally quote unquote accurate, but one that makes people hype their product more. Then we should think about maybe, um, some foundational guidelines, either in peer review and publishing that would encourage people to measure it the way that doesn’t lead to exaggeration.

[00:37:20] Scott: And we

[00:37:21] Frederick: know when there is billions of dollars being pumped into this stuff, that there is clearly an incentivizing, uh, motivation. Right. Um, to get us to buy into the hype mm-hmm. and to jump on the bandwagon. Scott, um, what can I say? This is your work, your work also on, you know, really ambitious work to carve out a unified.

[00:37:48] Frederick: Field of, uh, rhetorical, you know, approach to all things, um, is really incredible as well. I know you published on that, um, in your book from 2020, but let me just end by saying, This. Thank you, Scott. I mean, the, basically make, you know, the kind of critical, critically optimistic, um, position or what maybe we could say an eyes wide open, critical optimism that you bring to your work, to the world, to the questions, um, that drive your research and your own passion.

[00:38:27] Frederick: Well, thank.

[00:38:28] Scott: Yeah, I’m, I’m glad to do it and I’m glad to do it in a, in a space like this in particular, um, so many of these conversations these days are happening on Twitter, and there’s a lot of cool stuff on Twitter, but it’s not a place for nuance, right? It tends to get pithy, polarized statements, and so I always love being able to talk with anybody in a venue that allows these kind of questions and allows for the, the answers that are not.

[00:38:56] Frederick: The answers that are not easy and that you don’t do such an incredible job at kind of re-articulating for, for all of us to understand better, you know, why they’re not easy and why we need to continue to kind of ask those. Im important, difficult questions. Thank you, Scott.

[00:39:16] Scott: Yeah, thank you.

[00:39:25] Scott: Into the Colli verse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find into the Color Verse Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.